The AAMAS06 Workshop on
Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems (COIN)

Hakodate, Japan

8-12 May, 2006

We aim at a
very interactive workshop. In order to facilitate the discussion, presentations
will follow a slightly different format than usual. Namely, each presentation
will be introduced by another participant. We have reserved 25 minutes for each
paper presentation. A presentation consists of the following parts:

Reader's perspective (5 min.): A short introduction
by one of the other workshop participants who has read the paper.

Paper presentation (20 min.): Presentation of the
paper by the author.

In the first 5 minutes, the
paper is introduced by another workshop participant who presents a reader's
perspective on the paper. If you want to make slides for your introduction, the
limit is 3 slides. During this brief introduction, the introducer may discuss
things like:

A brief (subjective) summary of the paper

His/her view on the paper

The relation to his/ her own work

Constructive criticism

Suggestions to the author

Each session (consisting of
3 papers) ends with a short (15 minutes) round table during the presenters of
all three papers will answer questions and discuss the session topic with the
audience.

Aims and Scope

Multi-agent systems are often understood as complex entities
where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or
collective purpose. Such a view usually assumes some form of structure, or set
of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to
make them more effective in attaining those goals, more certain for
participants or more predictable. The engineering of effective coordination or
regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex
multi-agent systems.In recent years, social and
organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research.
Recent applications of MAS on Web Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous
Computing enforce the need for using these aspects in
order to ensure social order within these environments. Openness,
heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS
interaction models. Therefore, the view of coordination and control has to be
expanded to consider not only an agent-centric perspective but societal and
organization-centric views as well.

The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic and
technological dimensions of agent organizations, and the co-evolution of agent
interactions, provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research
questions at different levels of abstraction. Consequently, this workshop
provides a space for the convergence of concerns and developments from MAS
researchers that have been involved with these issues from the complementary
perspectives of coordination, organizations, institutions and norms.

The COIN workshop is a continuation of the ANIREM and OOOP workshops held in
AAMAS’05. A twin event of COIN --focused, then, on organizational aspects
of agent interactions-- is expected to be collocated with ECAI'06.

Theme and Topics

The COIN workshop in AAMAS’06 will focus on the normative or
prescriptive aspects involved in agent coordination.

We particularly encourage authors to submit innovative and original papers
that report on
• Formal and theoretical models
• Software frameworks, tools, and methodologies
• Applications, case studies, and experimental work

Papers describing ongoing work and position papers are welcome.

Proceedings

Proceedings will be available at the workshop. It is planned to publish
revised and extended versions of the papers as a Springer LNCS volume (pending
confirmation).

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:( January 15 )extended to February 01
Notifications of acceptance/rejection: February 19
Camera-ready copies due: March 5
Workshop Date: May 9

Preparation and submission of papers

Paper submission is possible only by email. Authors are requested to send a pdf file attached to an email message to Virginia Dignum at
virginia@cs.uu.nl.
The message should contain the paper title, author name(s) and affiliation(s),
contact information of one of the authors, and an abstract of at most 200
words. The abstract must identify the main topics of the paper. Full papers
should have a maximum of 12 pages and must be formatted using the Springer LNCS
style. Templates are available at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
.